Posts Tagged ‘digital distractions’

What would you say if I told you that 15.5% of elementary students, grades 1-5 have been diagnosed with ADHD? Recent data from the National Health Center showed that as of 2015, 10.2% of children ages 5-15 were diagnosed with ADHD. From 1980 to 2007, the diagnosis of ADHD in the pediatric population increased by 800 percent! These dramatic increases indicate that the cause may not just be genetic. Experts are looking to environmental factors to explain the sharp rise in ADHD among children. According to Victoria Dunckley, M.D., the answer could be in the palm of your hand.

As reported by Victoria Dunckley, MD, integrative child psychiatrist and author of the book, Reset Your Child’s Brain, technology is having a negative impact on our children’s brain health and development. Electronic Screen Syndrome (ESS), is the result of over exposure to screens in the forms of video game systems, tablets, and smart phones. Electronics can overstimulate and deregulate a child’s nervous system. The added overstimulation and stress cause children to have issues with mood, focus, sleep, and behavior. (Dunckley)

How does Electronic Screen Syndrome affect children?

Constantly interacting with the artificial stimuli that screens supply, shifts the nervous system into a stressed mode. Our brains and bodies are meant to handle some stress, but repeated stress can overwhelm our body’s ability to adapt. Usually, high stress levels normalize when followed by an appropriate discharge of energy (think fight or flight). However, screen time is generally paired with a lot of sitting. Where does the energy go? According to Dunckley, it gets released in the form of a tantrum or other inappropriate behavior. Dunckley further points out that if we were to look inside a brain engaged in screen-time, we would see that brain getting too much activity in some areas, such as reward pathways, and not enough in other areas such as the regions associated with empathy. This leads to fragmented brain development, making it less flexible and resilient. (Dunckley) One of the strongest impact of screens on the brain is with regards to sleep. The unnatural, bright light from a smart phone or tablet slows the production of the sleep signal, melatonin. Lack of melatonin desynchronizes the body clock resulting in poor sleep and disrupted hormone cycles. In fact, weight gain and high blood pressure related to screen-time could be a result of constantly high stress hormones, as well as being overly sedentary. (Dunckley)

What behaviors are associated with ESS?

Irritability

Oppositional-defiant behaviors

Social immaturity

Poor eye contact

Insomnia

Learning difficulties

Poor memory

Lack of focus

Tantrums

Disorganized behaviors

Children with underlying issues such as ADHD and Autism will display more severe versions of the symptoms. Often these children are more likely to be drawn to screens. Parents can mistake the kids’ “quiet” behavior while playing on a tablet as improvement. Try taking the screen away, and you soon realize that the screen was only masking the issues! (Dunckley)

Parents worry that their child will be the only one without a tablet, or that he won’t make friends, or learn the latest technology. That is not the case. For young children the importance of being screen free is to allow their brains to naturally develop strong neuronal connections. The brain’s most rapid growth is during the first few years of life. Assaulting those brains with digital media is preventing them from reaching their true potential academically and socially. Children benefit so much more from human interaction and outdoor play. Let our children’s brains grow and develop so that they can withstand the effects of the latest technology.

What can parents do to help their children?

Dunckley suggests an electronic fast, 3-4 weeks of strict removal of all electronic media. Doing so, will help reset your child’s brain, allowing you to focus on what is really going on with your child, without having to deal with the added behavior issues.

Encourage your child to engage in other activities. Have a family game night. Help your child find a sports team or club to join.

Brainjogging twice a day can help children get their brains back in sync. The exercises in Brainjogging target the areas of the brain controlling focus, attention, memory, and processing. Brainjogging’s simple design and quick exercises make it highly effective for all children.

While most parents start their children on Brainjogging for academic reasons, the first change they notice, is in their child’s behavior. A child who is out of sync, will have trouble regulating his emotions and behavior. A child who has made the important connections in the brain is in sync will be more flexible, more resilient, and will demonstrate improved behavior and focus!

Screens are everywhere! Even as we enter a bookstore, we see a variety of tablets and big HD screens playing the latest movie releases. But, when all is said and done, are the 30 minutes of quiet time we get from giving a child a smart phone or iPad a good exchange?

There are emergency situations that pop up, and as parents we need to do what is right for our children based our individual situations. But what about our daily regular daily routines? What are we trying to accomplish by giving a child a smart phone? Maybe we want a quiet dinner, or we want to be able to finish cleaning the kitchen. We might need some extra time to respond to work emails. And we should be able to have time to do these important tasks. But when we give a child an iPad at dinner, he may be quiet, but he is missing an important part of growing up! The interaction children get at dinner when they can sit with their family in a safe environment and discuss the day’s events is important for social development.

Instead of turning on Netflix while you clean, maybe have an activity they can work on in the kitchen. Better yet, divide the chores according to age and everyone is able to help clean the kitchen faster!

Responding to work emails is trickier! If you can’t wait until the kids are sleeping, maybe you can respond during homework time, and let the kids know that you have work to complete as well.

When a child is misbehaving at the supermarket, will giving him a smartphone solve the problem? Probably not. The child has learned that the reward for misbehaving is getting to play on your smart phone! Instead, plan on quick trips to the store or make a list with your child to make your food shopping a fun learning experience too. The supermarket is a great place to talk about eating healthy, letters, counting, money, manners, and more!

Numerous studies have shown that children who play games on iPads and smartphones, talk later, have less focus and attention, and can even have delays in basic motor skills. Have you ever tried to take an iPad away from a 5 year old? The hour it takes to bargain with your child to get the iPad back makes the 30 minutes of quiet seem irrelevant!

The next time you need to occupy your children to get work done, take a second to think of the pros and cons before handing them a screen. If you can’t think of any other activity, I’ve given you a list below!

Here is a list of some activities they could do instead (there are a lot more!):

Is it me or is there an app and screen for every moment in our lives? My two year old doesn’t know the alphabet! There’s an app for that! Our baby won’t stop crying! There’s an app for that! But, what if the “app” cannot be found in our phone’s app store. What if the real “app” was within us all along!

Digital media, in particular tablets, seem to be taking over our children’s lives. At a young age, children are exposed to YouTube videos of nursery rhymes, “educational” apps, and endless cartoons that can be repeated with just a touch of the screen! (Trust me, I’ve been there!) But what we see as entertainment and convenience is really changing our child’s brain and in fact making it more difficult to parent!

Time and again, peer-review studies have shown that kids raised on a high-tech diet struggle with attention and focus. Creators of “educational” video games claim that students no longer have the attention span for traditional learning. However, giving students lessons on tablets is not helping the problem, it is making it worse! These children are only motivated and focused in front of a screen. They aren’t able to engage and stay focused in normal every-day tasks. Dr. Kentaro Toyama, from the University of Michigan’s School of Information found in his research that technology helps education when the educational system is already doing well. Unfortunately, it does little for mediocre systems, and even worse in dysfunctional schools. Dr. Toyama states, that technology “can cause outright harm” in these schools.

At a young age, exposure to screens can be extremely harmful. Through the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine, the brain’s “motivation chemical”, babies and toddlers are conditioned to focus only when given the immediate rewards or feedback found in technology. And while you might claim that you only allow your toddler to watch educational shows, in reality, children under 2 do not understand how the world they see on a screen relates to reality. Young children need to interact directly with people and objects around them to fully understand how their world works.

Unfortunately our country’s education system has become highly dependent on technology. The education technology industry is estimated to become a 60 billion dollar industry by 2018! The convenience of giving each student a tablet, that can be updated within seconds, seems to have outweighed the risks to our children’s health. Jane Healy, education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect our Children’s Minds, reports that “time on the computer might interfere with development of everything from the young child’s motor skills to his or her ability to think logically and distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

The future of our families, our country, and in fact our world lies in the minds of our children. We can encourage new ideas by giving our children tools that develop their skills to think creatively and critically, and to observe the world around them. So the next time your baby cries, instead of finding the YouTube video for Rock-a-bye Baby, maybe you can put on one of your “old-fashioned” CDs, or even sing the song yourself!

Resources:

Screens in Schools are a $60 Billion Hoax, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Time, August 31, 2016

Screen Addiction is Taking a Toll on Children, The New York Times, July 6, 2015

Wouldn’t it be interesting if each interruption in our lives started out with “Excuse me…?” We would never be able to function due to all the noise! Our children are now exposed to more interruptions than ever – phone calls, text messages, Facebook alerts, and other digital distractions.

A newly released study out of Michigan State University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory examined college undergraduates first few seconds of post-interruption performance on a cognitively complex task. After a 2-second interruption, participant errors DOUBLED! Each time a person was interrupted for as few as two seconds, upon returning to their task-at-hand the mistakes were outrageous! Imagine the implications for your child! During homework, are text messages coming in? One student recently had 27,000 incoming and outgoing texts over one month! A nine year old fell asleep daily for two weeks in math class. He reportedly was staying up late at night on his cell phone!

When using the Brainjogging Program, one of the many benefits is the brain is “in training” to increase cognitive agility! Amazing how only five to seven minutes affects the brain performance! Students’ focused attention will increase and recovery time will decrease! If they do attend to interruptions, their ability to return to the task at hand may be without errors! Brainjogging to the rescue!